Leslie Valiant, a versatile computer scientist at Harvard University whose work has impacted everything from artificial intelligence to distributed computing, has been named the winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award.

The annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize in Computing," recognizes Valiant for his broad contributions to computational learning theory and computer science. The award comes with a $250,000 prize funded by Google and Intel.

"Leslie Valiant's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and led to extraordinary achievements in machine learning. His work has produced modeling that offers computationally inspired answers on fundamental questions like how the brain 'computes,'" ACM President Alain Chesnais said in a statement. "His profound vision in computer science, mathematics, and cognitive theory have been combined with other techniques to build modern forms of machine learning and communication, like IBM's [Jeopardy! champion] 'Watson' computing system, that have enabled computing systems to rival a human's ability to answer questions."

Valiant winning the award is "a great story about how theoretical work can help frame the way people think about [assorted computing] problems, which in turn leads to novel solutions in a whole range of applications," Kleinberg says.

The Harvard professor's work also led to advances in areas such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition and computer vision, according to the ACM.

"If you use a highly synchronized approach to moving your data then there's something in the nature of structure and movement patterns that creates hotspots when everyone tries to go through a single central point," Kleinberg says ."One of [Valiant's] contributions that has become a paradigm used in many contexts is that randomization can help smooth out congestion."

Of late, Valiant has focused on computational neuroscience and has published a book called "Circuits of the Mind" that takes a computational approach to studying how the human brain works.

Before joining Harvard in 1982, Valiant taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Leeds University and the University of Edinburgh.

Bob Brown is a news editor for Network World, blogs about network research, and works most closely with our staff's wireless/mobile reporters. Follow him on Twitter at Alphadoggs and connect via email at bbrown@nww.com